For the truth is, if you are wronged by other men, you have the better of it, for it is better to bear wrong than to do wrong a great deal. If they wrong you, you are in a better condition than they, because it is better to bear, than to do wrong.

If our value is tied to his purity, we will be devastated. If our security is grounded in his job title, we will be shaken. If our faith rides the coattails of his, we will find ourselves drowning in unbelief.

Go to work utterly dependent on God (Proverbs 3:5-6; John 15:5). Without him you can’t breathe, move, think, feel, or talk. Not to mention be spiritually influential. Get up in the morning and let God know your desperation for him. Pray for help.

If coffee or chocolate or anything else other than God is the highlight of my day or the ultimate joy of my heart, my joy is temporary, hollow, thin.

But if I believe in the gospel, I can finally enjoy the chocolate-ness of chocolate and the coffee-ness of coffee. Only the gospel frees me to enjoy things as they truly are and as they someday will be.

I asked him if he would do the same thing. I told him I knew – it ? would be much, much harder for him. But IF he were completely convinced that this was not what God wanted for his sexuality, that it was actually hindering him from being who God wants him to be, if he were somehow convinced…

This week: panoramas from Hiroshima, what not to say to a depressed person, real men, killing moralism, and ebooks vs books.

After the Bomb – Hiroshima Panoramas (Google Maps Mania): I lived in Japan about a 45 minute train ride away from Hiroshima from 7th-9th grade. We visited Peace Park many times where the dome you see above still remains as the centerpiece of the park, the only building really left standing after the bomb.

Over a person’s life-time, their risk of experiencing clinical depression is 10-20% in women and girls, and slightly less in males. Yet despite the fact that depression is so widespread, it is apparently still a very misunderstood illness. That’s the only conclusion I can draw from some of the insensitive, crass and sometimes downright bizarre things people have said to me about my depression over the years.

We must always remind our people (and first, ourselves) that God commands us to act—not that we might become good, but that we might know and show him to be good. God does not reveal his will so that we can build our confidence in our ability to keep it, but so that we can exalt and exult in the God we know by grace.

I’ll never forget the day my dad came to me and confessed his sins against our family and me. He admitted he was wrong in so many areas of his life, and that by God’s grace he would be a better example of what a man truly is. He didn’t only do this with me, but also with so many people he had wronged throughout his life. It was in that moment I learned one of the most important things about being a man.

eBooks are making reading a lot more accessible. People who couldn’t read can read now – Larger text and Text to Speech is opening up reading to a lot more people. Additionally, People can read now in places and at times when they couldn’t read earlier. You can read on your phone, on your PC, or on your eReader. As Jerry Lee Lewis would put it – Whole lotta reading going on.

In C.S. Lewis’s, The Horse and His Boy, two horses and their riders are racing back to Archenland to warn the king of their enemies, who are arriving unaware. Although they are going fast, the horses are not quite running as fast as they could. Suddenly, a lion jumps out of the thicket and begins to pursue the horses, who find that they could actually run faster. Later, we learn the lion was Aslan himself, scaring the horses to run at their true speed as they needed to go faster because of the pursuing army.

In other words, the sin of lust is the sin of an evil eye. It is the sin of greed, of Mammon, of idolatry. It is the sin of hatred and oppression and injustice in seed form in the heart. And this sin necessarily grows up into tyranny and oppression and manipulation in actions, in words, in thoughts, and it fills homes with curses.

Today, there can be no doubt that the high priests, priests, and acolytes of our culture are the producers, directors, writers, and actors. As film increasingly presents people with opportunities to replicate certain aspects of religious experience, we must pause to reflect upon the growing reality of “theater as temple.”

I truly believe, after many years of reflection, that the heart of the problem in these churches was in their attitude towards the unbeliever. The person next door was the enemy; he was a person to be feared for what he might do to the family, and the children in particular; he was someone to be regarded with distrust and suspicion rather than with love and sympathy.

Our Jacob-like fight is is just one part of this glorious battle. As God lovers, we struggle toward light. We fight to keep faith alive. We don’t curse a faceless universe and stay alive out of spite, we have a goal, a marvelous light, an unceasing love that exists beyond the touch of any darkness. Toward that, we fight. For that good, we will grapple.

The closer you get to home, the less intriguing the work of sacrifice seems. As someone once said, “Everyone wants to save the world, but no one wants to help Mom with the dishes.” When you are a mother at home with your children, the church is not clamoring for monthly ministry updates. When you talk to other believers, there is not any kind of awe about what you are sacrificing for the gospel.

Look around. Any time you hear the word fair you will find broken relationships and other forms of nasty fruit. Guaranteed. In other words, during our fine dinner, I was actually turning away from Jesus Christ to utter some profanity – “this waiter should know better; this isn’t fair” – while my wife continued on her normal course of sanctification, except for when she tried to stab my hand.